THE CARTEL TOAD
by PAUL F COGANPublish: Apr 20, 2024Action & AdventureBook Overview
The story of multiple Mexican teen women recruited as killers for a Mexican enforcement cartel, and their pursuit and training by the leader of the world’s largest cartel of murders who realizes women will be the next true leaders in the future of the cartel underworld. What’s it like to be an enforcer in a global drug-trafficking organization? And how do Mexico’s impoverished women go from being the wife of a cartel leader to a trained assassin, surging up the cartel corporate ladder? At first glance, Elsbeth Ortrix, a vagabond street artist becomes the poster child of all cartel enforcers. The streets of her neighborhood in Mexico City are poor and dangerous, and it isn’t long before Elsbeth abandons what she hoped would be a promising future career as an artist for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. Her time spent in working for the Zetas, included boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of her cartel’s leadership.In The Cartel Toad Paul Cogan shares the stories of these young women, taking us from the North Pole mountaintops to the dusty, dark roads of one of Mexico’s largest barren deserts, on a harrowing, often brutal journey into the heart of Mexico’s cartel underworld. Elsbeth’s evolution from a promising good-natured teenage artist into a feared assassin is as inevitable as her slow realization of the impossible nature of the new career she has chosen for herself.
A fictional thriller, The Cartel Toad depicts more than just Elsbeth’s unforgiving life. It shows, through vivid detail and rich, often moving, narrative, the way in which the life of a cartel enforcer itself is changing, disappearing, and posing new, terrifying, and yet largely unseen threats to Mexico’s national security. Ultimately though, The Cartel Toad is the intimate story of the “Flams of the Flacas Cartel” themselves: young girls turned into pawns for the cartels. Their stories show how their own poverty and their misguided ideas about their identities, is warped by their desire for respect and power.
